Hisashiburi!

Long time no see, nerds!  Yes, much to your relief (or chagrin, depending on who's reading this), I haven't been stabbed by a samurai sword, eaten by spiders, or flipped my car in a catastrophic but adorable accident (on virtue of the bite-size cars here).  I should mention that these are all real dangers, but thus far I have prevailed, survived long enough to resume--in an extremely belated fashion--the publication of this esteemed blog.  (Wait, before I get too far out here, I should probably mention that I haven't actually run the risk of being impaled on a katana.  I think.)  Although the content of each post will probably be somewhat different from the last batch of two years ago--i.e. the adventures of a gainfully employed, grown-ass man compared to some kid jacking around in a foreign metropolis for a few months--I aim to maintain the distinct quality that was characteristic of that first chapter.  You know, that rich style that made you roll your eyes so hard they nearly departed from your skull in a brisk fashion, as if they were booking it from the theater after the first five minutes of The Last Airbender.  This shouldn't be difficult, though; as I intend to convey to you, dear reader, my excitement at being in Japan has hardly diminished for having already been here once before.  Once again, I'd like to thank you for stopping by; the thought of you (yes, you) curled up by your laptop late at night when you need to get up in the morning to go to class or work/buy kolaches before they close/water your neighbor's plants serves as a more stimulating muse than I've ever had.  So, I'd like to invite you to wade onward and enjoy this account of my experiences in and observations about Japan, along with the occasional dick joke, cuss word, and esoteric reference swirled in for good measure.

So.  I've already been in Japan since the end of July, which means I've already experienced a lot of things and a lot of stuff.  For the sake of both brevity and clarity, I'll unfortunately be unable to give as much attention to each individual item as I should like to, but that's what I get for being lazy as shit.  Let's rewind to five weeks ago.  (Click.  …That's the sound of me rewinding.  The tape.  Five weeks back.  Okay.)  So I left outta Houston, where I fuelled up on good beer and tex-mex for the long haul, had my first trans-Pacific flight, and landed in Tokyo to get oriented and shit.  Orientation was, in a word, pretty fuckin' rad.  I think JET hires up to age 35, but my incoming class was overwhelmingly recent college graduates.  Predictably, when you stick a bunch of kids who have at least one shared major interest and are already mega pumped to be in Japan (many for the very first time) in one of the busiest parts of Tokyo, the resulting critical mass of sheer excitement would produce enough energy to power a small eastern European country for a year.  And that's exactly what it was like for me, returning to Japan and meeting tons of really cool people.  Surely that's what they had in mind when they put "euphoria" in the dictionary.  I probably could've taken a bullet and shaken it off with a smile on my face.  I roomed with two of the guys who I had flown in with, Lance and Jose; we spent much time after each day's workshops bossing around town like the foreigners we were and eating ramen that was waaayyyy too spicy.  And once we finally met up with the other kids who were placed in the same prefecture--well, that is when the shit got real.

At this point I want to introduce to the plot two key members of the cast, Carly and Amanda.  Well before I showed up, we had already known that we were all going to be living in the same apartment building together and doing a lot of overlapping professionally; so I knew that a mission-critical objective was to deceive them into thinking that I'm not a complete jackass for as long as possible.  I think at this point I've already abandoned the charade.  When our prefecture gathered, Carly was the first one I met.  Recognizing her from the Facebooks,  I politely informed her that I was the dude she was going to be living with.  She responded by giving me a look that said, "Great!  The fuck are you?"  See, I had cleverly disguised myself by getting a close shave and haircut right before I left, hence her confusion.  That was quickly resolved, and then Amanda came in.  Literally the first thing she said was, "You guys, we're going to become best friends!"  This was a fortuitous event; I was so elated I was going to say that myself.   We went out a couple of times as a prefecture too, including the obligatory inaugural karaoke visit.  (Incidentally, I don't think I've ever been to karaoke without "Bad Romance" coming up.)  I should mention that going out in urban Japan is insane; take the sum total of all the bright lights and the sound of any major city's downtown, compact it down, then liberally squeeze the resulting product into cramped blocks and tiny streets.  You would imagine that the zoning board was aiming to inflict as much sensory overload as possible.  In short, the profusion of neon signs, the loud yells of hawkers standing in the road, and the pervasively wafting scent of noodle shops and conveyor-belt sushi restaurants combined to make a not-so-gentle reminder that I had, in fact, wound up in Japan once again.

 

We also learned some useful stuff during the workshops, but that's boring.  What wasn't boring, however, was the day we left for our town, Gosen.  I'll have a bit to say about the town later, but for now, just keep in mind that Gosen is a small, mostly rural town in Niigata prefecture, about three hours to the northwest of Tokyo by bullet train.  We showed up around lunchtime at the Niigata City train station (Niigata City being about a half hour from Gosen) and were greeted by three members of the Gosen Board of Education:  Kumakura-san, the section head; Nakahara-san, who coordinates with the school we teach at; and Yoshida-san, our supervisor whose main duty, in a nutshell, is to make sure we three don't die.  Also present was Yamagiwa-san, who was brought on to interpret.  However, we soon made it clear that we were equipped with some Japanese ability, much to the relief of everyone present; Yamagiwa-san joked that she would be fired.  I wasn't feeling super confident in my Japanese at that point, but I was really gratified that they had such a positive reaction.  I guess it was like, one, I was glad to be accepted, and two, it was great to see that my years of study were beginning to pay off in a really concrete way.  I would later find out that all but one of our predecessors spoke no Japanese at all, which is part of the reason why they chose kids who had some command of the language.  We had a bite at a sushi place--a heavenly welcome back to Japan--and were taken to the Board of Education office.  At this point we received our first practical test of Japanese--the self-introduction.  That day marked the first of approximately several million times that we've all been compelled to state such information about ourselves as our name, age, home country, and other trivia.  The bad news is, I've become immensely bored with myself as a person; however, blowing away coworkers with my (limited) ability to use Japanese is truly the best fun.  That, my friends, will never get old.  Later that night, we attended an important office function:  the enkai, or party.  Yes, a critical component of Japanese office culture is periodical enkai, where office workers meet at an izakaya (or Japanese pub) to eat, socialize, blow off steam, and drink enough beer to float an aircraft carrier.  In spite of our exhaustion and somewhat bewildered by our drop feet-first into life here, it was great to hang out and have a more personal connection with our coworkers from day one.  After walking home (the pub being close by), we returned to our new apartments and I gratefully crashed, tired, full of delicious Japanese food, and at least a little tipsy.  If not for the jetlag, that trifecta of circumstances would've put me in the best sleep of my life.  Would that we could all go to bed every night like that, huh?

 

From the next day on, we were on the clock at the BoE.  Fortunately for us that meant running around and doing all the necessary shit:  Getting our phones, a health examination--wherein they attached clamps and diodes to me and I legit thought they were going to shock the fuck out of me--and filling out all sorts of fun paperwork that I understood about 90% of the time.  (Maybe 70%.)  This exciting business was broken up in a few different ways.  On what was literally our second day of work, we met the mayor and had our first (yes, one of a couple) interview with the newspaper.  One day, Kumakura-san took us inside and out of Gosen; we got to scope out the gorgeous countryside that encompasses our small town, and we even checked out a temple way up in the woods.  Beyond that, the weekends have been super duper packed thus far.  I've danced in traditional festivals, been out camping on the beach at a taiko concert, shot off gnarly Japanese fireworks at my coworker's barbecue, partied in the city and elsewhere with fellow JETs old and new, relaxed in hot springs, made at least one new Japanese bff…the shit goes on and on and on.

But alas!  Alas, dear reader, I've come upon a major conundrum.  Were I to try and describe all these zany happenings at length, this single post would grow large enough to exert a powerful gravitational field, accrue matter, turn into a white dwarf, and finally (once its mass had surpassed 1.4 solar masses) collapse into a black hole.  Now, I've been called a dick before, but far be it from me to jeopardize the fate of the planet.  In the future, I plan to reference this past month where appropriate, but for now I'll draw this latest installment to a close.  But that was a pretty exciting list up there, right?  What a fucking tease.

 

NEXT TIME:  Gonna be talking about last week and this week, wherein I actually start teaching and shit!